With Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday, one thing becomes obvious: the production company’s agenda. After the Friday the 13th Box Office peaked with Steve Minor’s Friday the 13th Part 3, our machete-carrying zombie’s returns steadily declined with each new chapter. When the latest installment, Rob Hedden’s Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan, failed to break 15 million for the first time in the franchise’s history, Paramount Pictures sold the rights to New Line Cinema. When viewed historically, the catastrophe that is Adam Marcus’s debut feature makes sense: New Line’s Freddy Kruger had been killed off two years prior. Thus, to pave the way for the two iconographic killers’ much-anticipated face-off, the company needed to do the same with Jason, which they aptly succeed, and with little to-do, via the closing entry in the Friday canon.
Jason Voorhees (Kane Hodder) is tracked down and killed by the FBI. However, his essence nonetheless remains intact as it moves from body to body in its pursuit of another Voorhees.
Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday is self-referential in more ways than one. Not only does New Line set its goal of killing off their newly acquired villain as quickly as possible, but the studio does so with little respect to either the character, his history, or the audience. At first, the viewer baulks at the feature opening without a video montage recap of what came before due to the fact that a) most prior entries made such somewhat of a trademark of the series and b) more importantly, New Line allows a fledging director (how’s that for respect for audiences who have been faithful for almost a decade-and-a-half?) to bypass the “good times” in, of all places, the capstone? However, as we progress through the picture, we learn that such negligence is more than likely due to the filmmakers (for shame, producer Sean Cunningham) not having bothered reviewing the previous eight films. If they had, they would know that one of the signature traits of the Friday films is that they are a collective of one of the few horror franchises to do their audience the credit of legitimizing the killer’s reemergence each and every time. With Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday, we are merely left with the long-shot assumption that toxic sludge didn’t do him in after the final frame of Rob Hedden’s Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan because, hi-ho, here he is again. Moreover, the Voorhees tradition of shattering a least one door, tossing a body through a window, and entering by the same avenue is eschewed in a plotline which further admits it not only hadn’t done, but–more impertinently–didn’t care about, its homework.
One of the more lambasted entries in the Friday series is Danny Steinmann’s Friday the 13th: A New Beginning. Audiences complained that the feature’s twist ending, in which it is revealed that Jason hadn’t been behind nary one slaughter during the entire outing, was a cheap ploy. Regardless of one’s opinions concerning the feature, Paramount learned that if a killing were to take place in a Friday picture, viewers wanted it to be at the hands of the infamous masked killer. So what does New Line give us with their first go with Jason? Oh, Jason is responsible for the killings alright, but only in spirit for his body is eradicated in the opening scene. Thus, whereas the maniac of Steinmann’s feature looks like Jason but isn’t, Marcus’s film–à la Jack Sholder’s The Hidden–houses Jason murdering once more, but through the bodies of various peoples. On this note, it is no surprise that audiences, and especially fans, hate the work for it is hard to argue with the fact that the suspension upon which our disbelief hangs all but snaps when the Jason’s soul inhabits that of a guy in a power suit. At this juncture in the proceedings, the only fear that is evoked is the dread of being audited or, better yet in a moment symbolic of the film as a whole–for whatever inexplicable, unaddressed reason–being shaved prior to forthcoming possession.
But what can honestly be said of a feature which shucks any and all convention, even if it succeeded in bringing in audiences over the course of eight productions? For the first four films, viewers were content with the notion that Jason was merely human. When it was revealed in Tom McLoughlin’s Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives that our mass murderer was in fact supernatural and–by definition, a zombie–we reluctantly humored the notion before acquiescing to it. However, to end an established history upon a footnote, that is, that Jason is in fact a demon, is just poor taste (to be fair, it is the brevity and “subtlety” with which this factoid is issued that makes it so condemnable). This is the equivalent of taking a silent killer and placing words in his mouth, which–dauntingly–Marcus and New Line actually have the audacity to do. What are the immoral words of Mr. Voorhees? “Freeze. Get the hell away from her Ed.” We’ll leave the fact that those behind Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday also tack on the note that . . . Jason has a half-sister, which is just too cute for words in that we are left with the non sequitur that, though Jason’s elevator doesn’t quite go to the top, it seems unlikely that even he, the person who values carnage so highly, would leave his one Achilles Heel exposed for over 15 years.
Even a few ironies, self-referential in-jokes, and a handful of allusions can’t manage to make Adam Marcus’s vapid, insulting, poorly crafted and executed, exploitive excuse for a film tolerable as Hodder is killed by his own horror likeness, a character asks a group of hitchhiking teenagers if they are “[p]lanning on smoking a little dope, having a little premarital sex, and getting slaughtered?” as George Romero’s Creepshow, Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, and Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead films get a wink-and-a-nod. With this, and I doubt many fans would disagree, when considering the sad, sad manner in which Jason Voorhees passes, we are thankful he now rests in peace for, even a serial killing machine doesn’t deserve to suffer through another feature the likes of Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday.
And thus, in respect to Jason Voorhees’s nearest iconographic competitor, Freddy Kruger, few can argue–regardless of one’s ultimate assessment of the two characters–that the former struck a heavier chord upon the Jungian mindset for he persevered for a greater number of films (thereby substantiating, via Box Office returns, that audiences tired of Freddy long before Jason) as the mass murderer’s tenure lasted for almost twice as long (13 to A Nightmare on Elm Street’s seven-year run*), despite the fact that the franchise’s storyline–for all intents and purposes–ended with Joseph Zito’s Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (even though Kane Hodder’s latter-installment performances brought the character to a poignant hilt). It is largely due to this economic statistic that Voorhees is more mentally dominating for his seeming omnipresence, not only within the Friday the 13th features but on the Big Screen as well, relentlessly plagues us. In respect to craft, our silent antagonist evokes the archetypal dread we experienced with many of Hollywood’s Golden Era monsters as, as a whole, the Friday the 13th series–though not always as creative as A Nightmare on Elm Street–is more consistent and, contrary to popular opinion considering it is the prototypical slasher, more substantive. For example, though Kruger is issued a fairly fleshed-out back story, Jason’s history is a tragic one because, as Freddy’s motive metamorphoses from revenge to the shear joy of killing, Crystal Lake’s homicidal maniac is sympathetic in that his Oedipal Complex, when cast alongside his mental retardation, absolves him of guilt. (Unless one humors the notion that Jason committed the original killings, which still leaves the latter facet of the character’s makeup in contention.) It is through this that the hands behind Jason posit, much like John Carpenter’s moral meditation in Halloween, a socially-redeemable conceit. Yet, while Jason’s subconsciously Puritanical Code of Ethics condemns some immediately, no viewer is excluded from the metaphorical import because everyone carries his or her own set of vices.
*–Which is only superceded by Michael Myer’s 24-year residency, which is limited to only seven features, and Leatherface’s 20-year occupancy, which runs over the course of a scant four productions. Thus, a NOES film appeared once every 1.1 years, a Friday the 13th feature every 1.4, a Halloween picture every 3.4 (4 if one excludes Tommy Lee Wallace’s Halloween III: Season of the Witch), and a Texas Chainsaw Massacre creation every 5. In respect to the latter two franchises, an argument can be presented that their sequels, when viewed historically, were mere attempts to capitalize upon the former duo’s successes.
-Egregious Gurnow
- Interview with J.R. Bookwalter - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Andrew J. Rausch - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Rick Popko and Dan West - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Director Stevan Mena (Malevolence) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Screenwriter Jeffery Reddick (Day of the Dead 2007) - January 22, 2015
- Teleconference interview with Mick Garris (Masters of Horror) - January 22, 2015
- A Day at the Morgue with Corri English (Unrest) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Writer/Director Nacho Cerda (The Abandoned, Aftermath) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actress Thora Birch (Dark Corners, The Hole, American Beauty) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actor Jason Behr, Plus Skinwalkers Press Coverage - January 22, 2015
